Chapter 24
“Istill cannot believe you went through with it.” Leo circled him once in the little vestry, his pale eyes bright with unholy delight.
“There is barely a soul out there. Her sisters, her sour lump of a brother, a handful of the merely curious who came to see whether the rumors were true. And you, you great Highland lunatic, have dressed for a coronation. Or a rebellion. I confess I cannot decide which.”
“It’s a kilt, Leo, nae a declaration of war.” Magnus tugged the plaid straight at his shoulder where the brooch held it. It was his father’s brooch, dull old silver worn smooth by a dead man’s thumb. “Though if the room chooses to take it as one, I’ll nae stop them.”
“You are marrying an earl’s daughter in front of half the ton dressed as the thing they use to frighten their children to sleep.”
“Aye.” Magnus looked down at himself, at the dark green of his tartan and the dirk at his hip that had been his father’s before him and felt steadier for the weight of it than he had felt in all his months of borrowed English tailoring.
“I’ve spent a year now bowin’ and scrapin’, swallowin’ me tongue so that a pack of men I despise might one day open a door for me.
For one hour, on the one day that’s mine, I’ll stand up as what I am.
If they daenae care for it, they can look at their shoes. ”
Leo was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again, the teasing had thinned to something more careful.
“And her? Does she care for it?” He tilted his head.
“I ask as your friend, Magnus, and only the once, so hear me out. This is not how a man dreams of taking a wife. You cornered her brother in a garden and threatened him into it. She said yes to escape something worse, not to have you. You know that.” A pause.
“Are you certain she wants this? Wants you? Because a woman marched to an altar to be rid of one jailer will not thank you for becoming the next.”
The words landed exactly where Leo had aimed them, on the raw thing Magnus had been carrying since the garden and had not let himself look at straight.
“Nay,” he muttered. “I’m nae certain of it.
That’s the whole trouble.” He turned the brooch a quarter-turn under his thumb.
It was an old habit. His mother’s, then his.
“She agreed because her braither’s a monster and I was the door nearest to hand.
I ken that. And I mean to spend however long it takes provin’ to her that I’m nae a door at all.
That’s all I’ve got, Leo. Time, and the desire to do it right.
” He straightened. “It’ll have to be enough. ”
Before Leo could answer, a sound came from the chapel beyond, a stir, the collective indrawn breath of people rising. Magnus’s heart rate went up with it.
He came out to the head of the aisle and turned, and there she was.
Rosaline stood at the chapel door with the morning light behind her and her hand resting stiff on her brother’s arm, because custom demanded Samuel give her over. However, Samuel looked like he’d sooner hand her to the devil.
But Magnus did not look at him. He looked at her, at the pale blue of her gown, the dark brown of her hair, and the wary steadiness of her chin, that chin he had watched come up in a hedge maze a year ago and had not stopped thinking of since.
Every clever thing he had ever meant to feel about this bargain fell clean out of his head.
She looked at him. Down the length of the aisle, she looked at him standing there in his father’s plaid with his heart in his throat, and he watched her take in the whole outrageous sight of him. Something flickered at the corner of her mouth that was almost a smile.
He held to that through every word the parson said.
The register was signed, the ring was on her finger—a plain gold band that sat strange and heavy as a shackle and a promise both—and it was done.
She was a wife. She was a duchess. She had walked into the chapel a Tilcott and would walk out of it something else entirely.
Rosaline stood on the worn stone steps in the thin bright morning and could not make any of it feel real. What felt real was the small body that collided with her legs.
“You are married.” Ivy’s face was blotchy, tipped up in furious grief. “You are married, and now you are going away. No one told me you would go away this very day. Are you going to Scotland? Are you going now, this minute, forever?”
“Oh, dearest. No.” Rosaline went down on her knees on the cold stone, heedless of the pale silk, and gathered her sister in her arms. “No, no. Not Scotland. Not forever. Listen to me.” She drew back and cupped the wet small face in her hands.
“I am going to Greythorne. It is scarcely two hours from home. You will come to me, and I will come to you so often that you will grow sick of the sight of me and beg me to stay away.”
“You promise?” A hiccup. “On the frogs?”
“On every frog in England.” Rosaline pressed her lips to her sister’s hot forehead. “And one day, when you are bigger, I will take you to Scotland myself, and you will see a real stag, and we will look for your fairy in every loch until our boots are soaked through. That I promise you, too.”
Ivy considered this and found it, at last, acceptable. She buried her face in Rosaline’s neck for one long, shuddering moment before Beatrice gently drew her back.
Beatrice’s own eyes were bright and hard. She did not weep. Instead, she turned to Magnus, looked a very long way up at him, all eighteen years of her drawn to her full unimpressive height, and did not flinch.
“You will be good to her.” It was not a question.
“She has spent her whole life being good to everyone else and letting no one be good to her. If you make her regret choosing you, Your Grace, if you make her small the way Samuel did, I will find a way to make you regret it. I do not yet know how. I am only eighteen, and I have no money of my own. But I read a great deal, I am extremely patient, and I never forget a slight.” She lifted her chin. “That is all.”
“And I shall put a frog in your bed,” Ivy added, from the safety of Beatrice’s side. “A large, slimy one.”
Magnus did not laugh, though Rosaline saw the effort it cost him. He crouched down instead, bringing all that Highland height to Ivy’s eye level, grave as a vow.
“Then I’m warned twice over by the two fiercest wee generals in England, and I’d be a fool to cross either of ye.
” He looked from Ivy to Beatrice, and there was nothing of the ballroom on his face.
“I’ll take care of her. Ye have me word on it, for whatever a Scot’s word is worth to ye, and I hope in time ye’ll find it worth a great deal.
She’ll want for nothin’, least of all choosin’ things for herself. That I’ll see to before all else.”
Beatrice studied him for a long moment with those careful eyes and then gave a small nod, as though she had entered his answer into a ledger she would be checking against him for the rest of his life.
Samuel had waited through all of it with the expression of one forced to stand downwind of something unpleasant.
When Rosaline rose and turned to him, he did not embrace her.
He leaned in close, under the cover of a stiff bow, and murmured, “I confess I am not even surprised. Given every chance to redeem yourself, and you contrive to find the worst match in the kingdom. A savage in a skirt. You always did have a knack for disappointing me.” He drew back a fraction, the pleasant mask still on for the onlookers. “Do enjoy the Highlands.”
Rosaline looked at her brother, at the cold handsome face that had ruled her every hour for three years, and found, to her quiet astonishment, that it no longer had the power to make her flinch.
“Be kinder to our sisters than you were to me,” she said, her voice steady.
“That is the only thing I will ever ask of you again, Samuel. When you are cold to them, when you are cruel, when you decide their futures for them as though they were livestock, I want you to remember that I asked you this on my wedding day and that you had the choice.”
Samuel’s lip curled. “How very touching.”
“She asked ye a plain question, Darton.” Magnus had come to stand at her shoulder. His voice was pleasant, but his eyes were not pleasant at all. “It’s customary to answer.”
For a moment, the two men held each other’s gaze. Samuel was the one to look away first, cover it with a laugh, and turn to make his farewells to people who mattered more to him than his sister ever had.
Magnus offered Rosaline his arm. After the briefest hesitation, she took it.
The carriage ride passed almost without words.
There was too much to say and no earthly way to begin any of it, so they said nothing, the two of them sitting across from one another in the swaying quiet while London thinned to villages and the villages thinned to green.
Once, when the wheels hit a rut, and she put a hand to the strap, she found him already watching her, and he looked away first. She understood with a small pang that the great Highland duke who had faced down her brother without a flicker was, on the far side of that same afternoon, nervous about her.
It was not at all what she had expected marriage to feel like on its first day.
Then again, nothing today had been.
Greythorne Hall came into view as the light turned long and gold, a great, warm pile of honey-colored stone set among old trees, nothing like the cold, grand mausoleum of Darton House.
Drawn up in a neat line before the front steps was the whole staff, every servant dressed in their Sunday best, waiting.
Rosaline’s stomach dropped. She did not know how to be a duchess.
She did not know how to be anything but a wallflower, a burden, the girl who managed her sisters.
She stood at the foot of the steps, with her hand cold on her new husband’s arm and every eye upon her, and had no idea in the world what she was meant to do.
Magnus covered her hand with his own, warm and steadying, and did not let her stand there alone for even a moment.
“Right, ye lot.” His voice carried easily down the line, and Rosaline felt the whole yard lean toward the warmth of it, the way she had learned everyone always did. “I ken ye’ve been standin’ here since noon, and Cook’s had one eye on the roast and the other on the door, so I’ll be brief.”
He gently drew Rosaline a half-step forward, and there was no pretense in his voice now, only something plain and proud.
“This is Rosaline McCormack, the new Duchess of Greythorne. Me wife.” A pause, and then, quieter, meant as much for her as for them: “The mistress of this house, and mine to be glad of. Ye’ll treat her as such, from the least of ye to the greatest, and any soul who gives her a cold hour will answer to me for it. ”
A murmur rippled down the line, and then, from somewhere near the middle, a stout woman in a snowy cap stepped forward and dropped into a curtsy. The rest immediately followed, a great soft rustle of bows and bobs, all of it aimed at Rosaline.
“Welcome home, Your Grace,” said the woman in the cap, beaming, tears brimming at the creased corners of her eyes. “We’ve waited a long time for him to bring us a duchess. We’ve nearly given up hope.”
Rosaline, who had been braced for the cold formality of the only great house she had ever known, who had come here a bargain, a rescue, a threat made good, stood in the long golden light before all those kind expectant faces and felt something in her chest quietly crack open that she had kept shut for a very long time.
She did not know yet what her marriage was. She did not know what her husband wanted from her, or what she dared to want from him, or how they were ever to speak of the hedge and the threat and the whole strange bargain that had brought her to these steps.
But it was warm here. That was the thing she had not expected. After a lifetime of cold rooms, the very first thing she had learned about her new life was that it was warm.
“Thank you,” she said to the woman in the cap, to all of them, her voice shaking only a little. “I am very glad to be here.”
And as she said it, she found that some small and startled part of her almost meant it.